Let’s see. Now that I’m back from Chicago, having recently attended a major cancer meeting, not to mention having already blogged about the meeting, what to do next? Sure, the whole thing about Andrew Wakefield finding himself just one step away from appearing on Jeff Rense‘s or Alex Jones‘s radio show was amusing in the extreme to me, and no doubt there will be much more blogging material to mine in that vein, but if you really want to bring home the crazy there’s only one place shy of Whale.to to visit.

That’s right, I’m talking about that wretched hive of medical scum and villainy, Mike Adams’ NaturalNews.com. Now, usually it’s the Grand Master of Woo and Quackery himself, Mike Adams, who really knows how to deliver the crazy quacky goods. Usually. This time, it’s one of Mike’s minions doing the duty, and addressing the nonsense in her post is a perfect post-ASCO thing for a surgical oncologist to do. The minion of woo is S. L. Baker, and the post is entitled Study shows how radiation causes breast cancer.

The first thing you need to remember about NaturalNews.com is that Mike Adams has a deep and abiding hatred of scientific medicine. One manifestation of this hatred is that, when it comes to breast cancer, to Adams surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation kill, not the cancer; “natural” therapies like vitamin D can prevent cancer with near 100% certainty and cure it with near 100% certainty if you happen to be someone who didn’t listen to Adams; and that early detection tests like mammography are always bad, although, ironically enough, a modality that claims to do the same thing as mammography without radiation (thermography, an unvalidated and not particularly useful old technology that, for reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, “alternative” medicine practitioners love) is the greatest thing ever. I’ve written about NaturalNews.com and its hatred of conventional therapy for breast cancer before. For instance, seven months ago, Mike Adams himself mined similar territory that his apparent acolyte has done, while earlier he abused Breast Cancer Awareness month to castigate the “breast cancer industry.” This time around his flunky Baker is doing the castigating:

It’s well-established that exposure to ionizing radiation can trigger mutations and other genetic damage and cause normal cells to become malignant. So it seems amazing how mainstream medicine frequently dismisses the idea that medical imaging tests from mammograms to CT scans could play much of a role in causing breast cancer.

Except that mainstream medicine doesn’t dismiss or deny the idea that medical imaging tests can increase the risk of cancer. There are hundreds of articles looking at the risk of cancer due to medical imaging tests. I myself have discussed the issue on no less than two occasions in December last year, once in the aforementioned context of mammographic screening for breast cancer and elevated risk of breast cancer in young women with strong family history of breast cancer or a mutation predisoposing to breast cancer, and once about the concern of the increased risk of cancer due to medical imaging, particularly CT scans. As with everything, it’s a matter of balancing risks and benefits.

After complaining about the material on this website at Cornell, Baker references a study by Paul Yaswen, a cell biologist and breast cancer research specialist with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. As is typical for NaturalNews.com, so much so that I strongly suspect it’s intentional, there is no link to the study, an abstract to the study, or even a news story about the study. Actually, I have little doubt that it’s intentional. If Adams or his minions were stupid enough to make it easy for readers to look up the primary sources being abused, it would be too easy for skeptics like me to go to that source and demonstrate the difference between what the scientific study said and the lies that Adams and his ilk tell about it.

One thing this passage should tell you right away is that the research being described is very basic. It’s also dealing with cells in a dish, not actual human breast cancer. As I always have to point out to my new students an dpostdoctoral fellows, tissue culture is a highly artificial system. Sure, it’s quick, convenient, and frequently useful. However, it’s also sometimes quite misleading. For one thing, cancer cells don’t grow on a plastic dish in what is, essentially, a two-dimensional array. They grow in 3D structures mixed in with other cell types, including fibroblasts, vascular endothelial cells, immune cells, and various other components of the stroma (the tissue admixed with and surrounding the tumor). Another problem is that cells are in essence selected by artificial selection to be able to grow well in cell culture. They are thus often genetically different than cells growing in actual tumors. Over the last couple of decades, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that tumor cells growing in 2D respond differently to growth factors and chemotherapy agents than cells growing in 3D models. It’s one reason why I’ve been striking up a collaboration with a basic scientist who has mastered a 3D culture model of breast cancer. Such a model is closer to “reality,” if you will, than standard tissue culture but at the same time far easier to deal with than implanting tumors in mice as xenografts.

None of this is to say that the research described in this paper is not worthwhile or useful. Rather, it is to be viewed as preliminary. In other words, it requires replication. More importantly, the results of this study should be viewed more as hypothesis generating than anything else. The conclusions need to be confirmed in actual human breast tissue–or at the very least in animal models.

So what did the investigators test? Basically, in normal HMECs grown in serum-free medium, a small number are capable of avoiding senescence. Normal cells in general can only divide a limited number of times. In the case of these particular HMECs, it’s around 5 to 20 times. After that, they stop dividing and enter what is known as a senescent state. Indeed, one of the key differences between cancer cells and normal cells is that cancer cells do not undergo senescence and can continue to replicate indefinitely, a state known as being immortalized. However, a small percentage of normal cells can escape senescence and continue to divide. In this particular system, the cells that escape senescence also develop genomic instability, meaning that they are more prone to developing additional mutations. In the case of HMECs, this loss of senescence appears to be due to the loss of p16, a tumor suppressor gene. Indeed, the mechanisms by which normal cells escape senescence are an area of intensive study, because escaping senescence is so important to carcinogenesis. Since radiation is known to be carcinogenic, the LBNL investigators were interested in whether radiation had an effect on senescence of HMECs harvested from women who underwent reduction mammoplasty (breast reduction) surgery.

To determine what role radiation might have on senescence, the LBNL investigators cultured HMECs and then exposed them to various doses of radiation, comparing them to similarly treated cells that were not radiated. What they found is that after six weeks the vast majority of the cells in both groups stopped dividing. They had become senescent. There were also cells of the vHMEC phenotype (the cells that had escaped senescence). There were the same number of senescent cells in both groups, the number of which didn’t depend on the radiation dose, but in the radiated cells there were larger numbers of vHMEC cells.

The authors then used a computer model to try to figure out what was going on and concluded:

Exposure to sparsely or densely ionizing radiation elicited similar increases in the numbers of vHMEC compared to unirradiated controls. Agent-based modeling indicated that radiation-induced premature senescence of normal HMEC most likely accelerated vHMEC outgrowth through alleviation of spatial constraints. Subsequent experiments using defined co-cultures of vHMEC and senescent cells supported this mechanism.

The idea is thus that radiation induces the premature senescence of normal cells, and that allows space for the vHMEC cells to grow. it’s not an unreasonable conclusion, although I’m always leery when a computer model is used to exaplain a result like that, because any computer model is highly dependent on the input data. It makes me feel a bit better that the LBNL investigators grew HMEC and vHMEC cells to try to validate the prediction of the model, but, again, this model is not the only possible explanation for these results. Another possibility is that perhaps there is a direct effect on vHMEC cells that stimulates their growth and genomic instability. Even so, I have little doubt that in these cells in this system radiation-induced premature senescence has something to do with either allowing or stimulating the growth of vHMECs.

Now back to NaturalNews.com, which concludes:

Of course, women are often pushed to get annual mammograms, raising their overall radiation exposure through the years. And, as NaturalNews has reported, previous research has already provided compelling evidence linking mammography to breast cancer.

For example, a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). And a Johns Hopkins study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute concluded radiation exposure from mammograms could trigger malignancies in women at risk for genetic breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/025560_cancer_brst_cancer_mammograms.html).

Of course, results from studies in tissue culture relying on modeling of population growth kinetics, while producing interesting and potentially useful results, should always be considered premature at best. For one thing, cancer is a lot more complicated than that. Cancer is a three-dimensional tissue. It’s also made up of far more than just the cancer cells and normal cells. It’s also made up of fibroblasts, blood vessels, smooth muscle, and immune cells, all in a certain hormonal milieu. Whether radiation does the same sort of thing in a real human breast, who knows? It might. It might not. We know that radiation can induce cancer in the breast; what we don’t know is whether this mechanism is even a significant mechanism, much less The One True Mechanism, which is how it’s being represented in press releases and on NaturalNews.com.

Another thing that is important to know about this study. The dose of radiation used ranged from 0 to 200 cGy, the lowest dose being 5 cGy. The lowest of these doses is around ten times the dose that even an old-fashioned analog mammogram can be expected to deliver to the breast parenchyma, namely 5 mGy. The corresponding author, Dr. Yaswen, puts it this way:

“The work we did was performed with non-lethal but fairly substantial doses of radiation, unlike what a woman would be exposed to during a routine mammogram,” says Yaswen, who is also a member of the Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center. “However, the levels of radiation involved in other procedures, such as CT scans or radiotherapy, do start to approach the levels used in our experiments and could represent sources of concern.”

This is, strictly speaking, true but rather deceptive. For example, a spiral CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis can result in a dose of radiation ranging up to around 30 mGy, or 3 cGy, which is in the same order of magnitude of the lowest dose used in this study. More deceptive still, these doses are doses the whole irradiated area of the body during a CT receives. Let’s assume a woman undergoes a CT scan of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis. Let’s further assume that the dosage received is around 50 mGy, or 5 cGy. Only a fraction of that radiation is going to be received by the breasts; so representing the entire dose of radiation from the CT as going to the breasts doesn’t tell the whole story.

Worse, discussing radiation therapy is way out. A typical radiation therapy protocol for breast cancer provides a total dose of 60 Gy in daily divided doses of around 1.8 to 2 Gy per dose. This is orders of magnitude higher than the highest dose provided to the cells. Moreover, the risks of secondary malignancies from radiation therapy for breast cancer have been studied and well-characterized. How relevant this LBNL model is to the development of these secondary malignancies is an open question. Unwittingly, Dr. Yaswen conflated the issue of radiation from imaging studies and radiation used for therapeutic purposes. In essence, he inadvertently made it easier for Baker and Adams to abuse the results of their research to try to scare women into not getting mammograms. I realize that most scientists don’t even pay attention to loons like Adams and his crew, but I wish more did and were more cautious about their public utterances about their research.

It’s also true that ionizing radiation is ionizing radiation but intent and dosage matter. Using radiation to treat a cancer is different from using it for imaging in that more risk is acceptable. For imaging studies, particularly screening studies, risk is to be avoided using the principle of primum non nocere. What’s also important to remember is that, while Baker and Adams of Natural News try to make it sound as though getting even a single mammogram is deadly, as I pointed out before when I discussed another study looking at mammograms and radiation, if there is an increased risk of breast cancer from mammography it is very small, so small that it’s hard to distinguish from the noise. More importantly, the benefits of screening certainly outweigh the risks for women over 50 and also probably outweigh them for women between 40 and 50.

Mike Adams and his minion S.L. Baker want women to think that breast cancer can be completely prevented by various “natural” supplements and that screening with mammography is so dangerous that no woman should do it. To that end, they will misrepresent and distort any study that they think they can use to serve their message.

While in New England recently I picked up a freebie copy of a “holistic” magazine containing health-related articles (and an amazing array of ads from woo practitioners). One of the articles confidently proclaimed that asthma is caused by chronic dehydration and hypertension is commonly due to “sludgy” overly viscous blood, while We$tern medical practitioners go about treating these conditions all wrong. I leafed back to the front of the article thinking “What deranged twit wrote this crap?”. Naturally, it was Mike Adams (here’s the article that apparently served as a source for his holistic journal piece).

On the one hand we have the “arrogance of ignorance” – with Mike and his acolytes it’s more accurately the arrogance of crazy.

Today, the meister of NaturalNews himself enumerates the many risks of EMF: we live in an environment polluted by “electro-smog” created by computers, phones(cell or wireless),power lines,…treadmills. Yes, your exercise equipment may be *hazardous to your health*.

For one thing, cancer cells don’t grow on a plastic dish in what is, essentially, a two-dimensional array. They grow in 3D structures mixed in with other cell types, including fibroblasts, vascular endothelial cells, immune cells, and various other components of the stroma (the tissue admixed with and surrounding the tumor).

This is one of the reasons I believe we need to be supporting human spaceflight. Seriously. One thing you can do in space that you can’t do on Earth is grow three-dimensional cell colonies. Without gravity smearing them across the plate as they divide, they grow in a blob shape, which though still not exactly how they grow in the human body (which, as you said, has different kinds of cells in it also), does a better job of modeling it than a flat colony in a dish. There’s a company specifically doing this; last I heard, they were growing ovarian tumor cells in the Destiny module of the ISS. That was a while ago; they have probably done more stuff since then.

Let’s further assume that the dosage received is around 50 mGy, or 5 cGy. Only a fraction of that radiation is going to be received by the breasts; so representing the entire dose of radiation from the CT as going to the breasts doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just a small, but important point to be careful about when discussing radiation doses. Radiation doses are in units of energy deposited (joules) divided by mass (kg). Volume is not important.

If we were talking about a chemical agent, then a large volume would dilute the chemical. This is not the case with radiation. A dose of 5 cGy is likely an average dose, with some volume receiving more, and some less.

An analogy would be temperature. If I said that body temperature went up by 2 degrees, it wouldn’t make sense to say since the breasts only make up a small fraction of the body mass, they will only go up by a small 5 of that 2 degrees.

Go get ‘im, Orac. *g* Today he’s claiming that radiation from your computer terminal and other EMF sources in your house and workplace will raise your blood sugar and make you a type-3 (sic) diabetic. Trufax! He read it on the internet!

Just a small, but important point to be careful about when discussing radiation doses. Radiation doses are in units of energy deposited (joules) divided by mass (kg). Volume is not important.

Of course, it should also be considered that most CT scans don’t even hit the breasts. Only CT scans of the chest or the thoracic spine are likely to deposit the full dose of radiation anywhere near the breasts. CTs of the abdomen and pelvis might catch the bottom part of the breasts, but that’s about it.

Cancer is a weird immune system disease, but in many cases it can be defeated without radiation and chemo. There are many supplements that can boost the immune system and defeat cancer, but the FDA (Fascist Dummy Association) wants to help out the cancer industry.

Ever wonder why the American Cancer Society is NOT The American ANTI-Cancer Society. They claim to seek a cure, but they refuse to listen to preventative measures.

My mother died of cancer in 2001. If I knew then what i know now, we could have told the Pakastani HMO Quack who treated her to take his rag back to Pakistan and we’ll treat it ourselves. I believe to this day he killed her.

He put her on some drug that he claimed would extend her life by as much as three months by slowing the cancer growth down. Why the hell didn;t he give it to her at he start of the cancer and then hit it full bore? I suppose he would not have gotten to line his pockets if he cured it early. What a system.

Then comes the sorry insurance system. The criminals there refused to pay for some treatments and only paid for half of some after they had been paid premiums for 12 years. I still think the insurers and the doctor should have been put in prison for running such a high tech ponzi scheme.

Want cheaper helathcare? Let’s get 250,000,000 people to drop their insurance and refuse to pay the hospitals and doctors. Let’s do it next thursday. All of us. Then make them beg for our business again. We they beg, we can then reset the prices of drugs, insurance policies, lawyer fees, and hospital rates. No settlement, not business. Deal?

P.S. I hope Orac is not as sensitive as PalMd. That guy is way too sensitive.

I’m glad this has come up, as I have been reading a lot about low dose ionizing radiation recently, and it is giving me a big headache. On the one hand you have those who argue that ionizing radiation is much more dangerous than is generally recognised. There is lots of information supporting that point of view here and with particular reference to x-rays and breast cancer John Gofman’s work here. Also worth reading on the same website is Ernest Sternglass’s book Secret Fallout. There is another website with similar information here and a page I found particularly interesting, regarding leukemia in Europe after Chernobyl and giving a reasonable hypothesis for why low doses of radiation may be more dangerous than higher doses here.

On the other hand, there are those who claim that not only is low dose radiation not as harmful as we have been led to believe, but that it is actually good for you. This site for example is full of information that would lead you to believe that we should all be bathing in radium for the good of our health. Just Google “radiation hormesis” for much more information.

There are even alternative health proponents who claim that radiation is good for you. You can buy radioactive health jewelry and radon mud packs that are used to treat cancer here but don’t tell Mike Adams. Don’t miss the Father’s Day special.

I don’t know what to make of all this. Is this radical contradiction simply the result of people trying to make out some meaning from what is simply noise? After all, the sorts of absolute risks we are talking about are quite small, with a plethora of confounders, but in a large population may affect hundreds or thousands of people. Both these viewpoints cannot logically be correct. Can anyone help me out here? I suspect it may be that it depends on the isotope involved, if it is ingested and concentrated in a particular organ, or if the body is simply irradiated.

So far everything that has seemed to work on cancer has involved making the immune system function better. Coincidence?

So far everything from the world of supplements such as Graviola, cat’s claw, etc., that has helped with cancer has also boosted the immune system. Coincidence?

In order to fight cancer, you first need to repair the immune system, not finish breaking it with chemo. When chemo is applied, it makes the cancer hide somwhere else, not kill it.

In order to defeat cancer, the root of the disease, immune system failure, first has to be addressed and repaired.

Instead of focusing on this, our brilliant minds in “science” are focusing on non-existant incidences (evolution) to fix a problem. They should be better managing the money that we 45% of hard working taxpayers give them to screw around with. Remember that 55% of the US does not even pay federal income tax. I say if they do not pay their share of the load, then they do not get to participate where the money goes since they did not contribute. If you don’t pay, then you don;t get your say. it’s only fair. Either everyone pays or no one pays. That’s the way it should be. Ban the IRS and income tax and incorporate a fair tax where everyone who lives pays the same percentage based on purchases. That way, illegal aliens pay, drunk bums pay, lazy hippy non-workers pay, everyone pays. That’s fair.

Anyway, enough about our messed up government tax system. I you wish to beat cancer, you must first recognize and repair your immune function. Otherwise, you will lose the battle.

The scientific method is not very good at proving absolute negatives. It makes predictions about how nature works and then performs tests or observations to see if those predictions are true.
There are many different types of cancer with different symptoms, prognoses, and effective (or less so) treatment methods. They share certain minimum features which is why they are classified together as cancer. A few of them even have a demonstrated correlation with infectious diseases. That is why we have the HPV vaccine for instance. So, some of them have at least a minimal connection with the immune system.

However, since you predict or assert that “Cancer is a weird immune system disease, but in many cases it can be defeated without radiation and chemo”, perhaps you can go the the American Cancer Society website (or the CDC if you wish) and pick 5 types of cancer and cite a published study referenced on Pubmed that demonstrates effective treatment without using surgery or chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

Assertion 2
“So far everything that has seemed to work on cancer has involved making the immune system function better. Coincidence?”

Looks more like either gross simplification or blatant lie, take your pick.
Since Orac is a professional cancer surgeon and continues to research effective treatments for breast cancer, he has cited a few references that demonstrate the effectiveness of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy as either primary or adjunctive therapy for various cancers. I am sure he knows of hundreds more. Just search Pubmed, for instance.
Nevertheless, I await your response to my comment for assertion 1.

Assertion 3
“So far everything from the world of supplements such as Graviola, cat’s claw, etc., that has helped with cancer has also boosted the immune system. Coincidence?”

Here you make a positive claim, but without references. While you are researching for assertion 1, could you cite a study from Pubmed demonstating the effectiveness of Graviola or cat’s claw in treating any particular cancer?

The FDA does not have total control over medical research funding even in the U.S. And, their scope was restricted in the original Act of Congress that established them and has been further restricted since then. Implausible treatments such as the Gonzales protocol manage to get investigated. That is, after all the reason d’etre for the NCCAM.

I’m going to say this in the nicest possible way: you are a fucking ignoramus. I leave it to others to school you on medical matters, but your taxation ignorance, I will cure.

It puzzles me how you and others of a similar bent seem blind to the taxes that people pay. Everyone who earns income pays 12.4% for social security (limited to the first $106,800 of income in 2009) and 2.9% for medicare (no limit). Only half of that is reflected in your paycheck, the rest your employer pays on your behalf. It’s still money you don’t get.

So those “deadbeats” working 3 minimum wage jobs are paying a 15.3% rate even if they don’t end up paying any federal income tax. Add to that sales tax which in most states is in the high single digits, plus car registration fees, etc. The lower the income level, the higher the percentage that goes to these other taxes and fees. The folks in the bottom quintile of income pay around 18% in taxes, the highest quintile about 21-22%. The fourth quintile actually pay more.

All those illegals you’re worried about? They pay sales tax and most pay SS and medicare. How? Many use someone else’s SSAN to work and the money is taken out. Several $billion a year are taken in that will never be paid out because they can’t collect on that bogus SSAN. Illegals aren’t the only ones who work for cash sometimes and don’t report it. Many tradesmen do the same.

Federal income tax is not the only tax out there based on your income.

Man. My mother just came off a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for her second breast cancer a couple months ago. I showed her this and she said she’d happily have donated her tumour to Adams, to be grafted into his chest so he can see if his methods work.
She can’t do it now, they took it out with a frickin’ laser beam – but if you can slap a tumour into a mouse, you can slap it into a self-righteous twit. Why does no one call his bluff and suggest this to him?

Of course, women are often pushed to get annual mammograms, raising their overall radiation exposure through the years.

It must have escaped their attention that there was a huge media storm just a few months ago about how the medical community’s stance had changed to recommending that women get mammograms only every 2 years, not every year, dropping the average woman’s radiation exposure (to the breasts) by 50%.

I’m sure that’s of little concern to these yokels, since they don’t want women to get ANY mammograms — but their (willful?) ignorance of changes in medical practices and standards, even when widely publicized, shows they don’t care much what the reality is.

There’s actually some evidence which hints that viewing cancer as an immune problem might be helpful in some cases. The two are certainly linked, for example a number of cancers are associated with immunodeficiency (think Kaposi sarcoma in AIDS-patients). And I think the view that micro-environments with some level of chronic inflammation are conducive to oncogenesis is pretty widely accepted. Note though, that in the latter case, it’s a case of the immune system reacting too strongly, rather than too weakly.

Its not just Adams that says radiation is bad for women, theres been many other people, health officials, and researchers who have said the exact same thing.

And theres no denying that cancer is a man-made disease that people have cured naturally before. Heck, many people have done so. If natural cancer treatment doesn’t work then how did they do that? But really prevention is the ultimate key.http://www.theherbprof.com/

Keep your body alkalinized (thats the true cause due to so many people’s crappy diets)! Then you won’t get the “scarily complicated cancer disease”. And personally, I’d rather die then get chemotherapy if none of the natural treatments worked.

Oh yes, fleur. I checked your reference. The “Herb Prof” claims to have cured himself of prostate cancer. One small problem – nowhere in his account is there mention of a biopsy.
Funny how I predicted that before reading his tale of woe.

“So far everything from the world of supplements such as Graviola, cat’s claw, etc., that has helped with cancer has also boosted the immune system. Coincidence?”

The simplest explanation (accepting the claim at face value) is that combatting the cancer reverses the weakening of the immune system.

I previously put the question to “Smart” how the immune system would combat cancer cells with the same genetic material as the rest of the body, and if it did what would stop the immune system from also attacking healthy tissue.
He clearly is not interested in answering questions.

You seem to have a deep hatred of alternative medicine…which is really irrational.

There’s no such thing as “atlernative medicine”. There’s only medicine which works, and medicine which doesn’t.

All of human history (- about 100 years) has bowed down to the former. We know better now. And it’s worse than hating “alternative” medicine – we simply dismiss it as self-delusional hogwash, profit and stupidity motivated.
And the few bits which were good – we use.

Orac and all you so called medical professionals.. just keep on spewing your hatred for alternative, basic, common sense thinking re. our bodies. I certainly hope you are pumping up your bodies with all your miraculous drugs!!! Enjoy!

I will happily stick to thermagrams, REAL food, herbal and homeopathic remedies

Too bad most people will work their entire lives to pay for their chemo and radiation treatment, let alone prescription costs for ‘basic needs’.
The current medical industry has many good hard working people, but the majority is run by money grubbers only treating symptoms, and most people cannot afford a runny nose, let alone cancer treatment.

You oversimplify the problem, Spencer. It’s not exclusively the problem of money grubbers running the clinics and hospitals and mandating that only symptoms be treated. (In fact, I’d like to know where that’s happening, that only symptoms are treated, so that some serious complaints can be raised. That’s called malpractice.) The problem permeates the entire system. Care is too expensive. Insurance is far too expensive. And because the bulk of reimbursement comes from insurance (despite a huge portion of the population being underinsured; most people who are uninsured simply don’t seek care in the first place), there is a tendency to adjust the care to what will be reimbursed. This includes going for a more expensive procedure because insurance will pay even if its not needed, and it also includes delaying care until insurance will pay for it, by which time it costs a great deal more.

There is also the problem that with so many uninsured, the risk pool is smaller, increasing the cost of insurance — and thus pushing more people out of insurance, which shrinks the risk pool further, and so on in a self-perpetuating loop that will ultimately reserve quality medical care for the wealthy only. There are a lot of problems with the system; it is by no means something we can just blame on greedy corporate health executives. They’re part of the problem, but the problem would still exist if they were somehow removed and other greedy people prevented from taking their places.

Chris, keep your condescension to yourself. Tea Bagger is such a derogatory term, you should be ashamed.
While my point was completely missed by you, it’s not surprising judging by your ‘superior’ attitude.

Calli Arcale– The heart of the problem was when government took over and started the welfare state years ago, but I was only referring to the attitude of the article in general. For the good ‘Doctor’ to totally poopoo alternative medicine just shows why we are where we are today. Prevention and proper nutrition is key, no matter how you look at it. Do you put diesel in your gasoline engine? Both are fuels, however….

I never heard the term “tea bag” in the sexual sense until well after the term had been snickered at on cable news (and have never heard it otherwise). For that matter, I’ve never heard of anyone performing that particular sexual act so often that anyone would bother to name it.

I don’t find it at all unlikely that the people who adopted that particular term were not aware of that usage, and can’t really say they were “out of touch” because of that. Continued use of that term is now simply an attempt to belittle people who hold different political positions from your own. In my opinion only, naturally.

1. They did originally call themselves the Tea Bag party.
2. Various people reporting on their activities noticed that “tea bag” was a double entendre as it could refer to a sexual act. This was particularly noticeable in cable news commentaries, though has certainly been used by various internet sources as well.
3. The Tea Party members changed the organization name.

The majority of people who now use the term “Tea Bagger” in reference to the Tea Party are aware of the double entendre aspect and either a) are adolescents who still think this kind of thing is cool (“The cock crowed three times – it says it right there in the Bible!”) or b) are attempting a put-down.

Oh. Thank you. I guess I was in the absolutely clueless camp. I think I’ll change it to Tea Party Patriots. Though I believe there should be quotes around the word “patriots.” At least there is a silly webpage for “teapartypatriots.”

Perhaps I run with a strange crowd but most people I know had heard of teabagging before this. I do admit my knowledge of of ribaldry is fairly strong. However it is not just the ignorance of the term that makes them out of touch, it is also that no one thought to toss the term into google to see if it was already used.

As for it being used as a put down, I agree, it certainly is. I also mean it as a put down. I just do not feel bad about it nor think the movement deserves respect. I do all I can to laugh at them, otherwise I might cry.

Cancer is the physical symptom reflecting our body’s final attempt to eliminate specific life-destructive causes. Removing such causes sets the precondition for complete healing of our body, mind and emotions. This is a radically new understanding of cancer – one that outdates the current cancer model. On average, the conventional approaches of killing, cutting or burning cancerous cells offer most patients a remission rate of merely 7%, and the majority of the few survivors are “cured” for just five years or less. The prominent cancer researcher and professor at the University of California (Berkeley), Dr. Hardin Jones, stated: “Patients are as well, or better off, untreated.” Any published success figures in cancer survival statistics are offset by equal or better scores among those not receiving any treatments. More people are killed by the treatments than saved. Cancer is not an attempt on your life; to the contrary, cancer is trying to save it. Unless we change our perception of what cancer really is, it will continue to threaten the life of nearly one out of every two people. This opens a door for those who wish to turn feelings of victimhood into empowerment and self-mastery, and disease into health.

Get over it. You “skeptics” know that the outdated reductionist-materialist paradigm is coming to an end. It will be replaced by a new science paradigm that believes in sustainable abundance that utilizes alternative health and free energy to its fullest potential. Potential thats been suppressed for pure profit reasons.

This blog is bullshit run by a corporate mouthpiece thats an insult to true science. At least Naturalnews exposes the truth that the cancer industry is the biggest scam in the history of humanity. The barbaric and useless treatments of orthodox medicine are dehumanizing and should be banned. For that matter all drugs should be banned. Conventional oncology have their hands covered with the blood of all the people who needlessly died from ineffective and outdated chemotherapy.

But you know the end of conventional medicine is coming, thats why you work so hard in your little-fact free blog to deny it. Its ridiculous to think that only a “chemical can cure”. Its the greatest myth of our time and Big Pharma-Profit-driven medicine’s propaganda bullshit. We do not need drugs. And we never did. The chemicals have only served to create the very illness they are supposed to “cure”. “Modern” medicine is a joke. Vaccines are a huge con job, they are the real quackery.

If we do not give up the old “sciences” and go towards a sustainable future civilization will end. And you “skeptics” (a.k.a deniers) know that and so you work hard to suppress the truth of our own demise.

Dr. I. M. Smart. You’re dumb enough to insult every person of Pakistan, because of one medical practitioner who may or may not have been from Pakistan. Stupid racist at it. Non-white doctors are apparently good enough as long as they provide your selfish white a** with hope, but if treatment doesn’t succeed, your true nasty self comes out.